Skid row isn’t abandonment, CA spends $47K per homeless person per year in direct and indirect assistance. It exists as it does due to intentional and well funded policy.

Even granting that (which... no. How is it true? Any evidence?) it's still less inhumane than what Japan is doing here. The conditions amount to torture.

The fact that many people opt to falsely plead guilty and get a reduced punishment in a society that highly values honor and saving face should say a lot about it.

Californian spend on homelessness is public info, you’re free to search it yourself.

There is something about seeing drug addicted zombies impossibly contorted in on themselves and swaying in the wind that appears very inhuman to me. If given the choice, pre zombification, of a false confession or life as a zombie I know which I would chose.

That's a false binary. European nations manage without either of them for example.

I think it is that the US is merely ahead of Europe and Europe will catch up to the US in this regard. Just give it 20 to 30 years.

Why do you believe mantaining an acceptable level of peacefulness requires torture?

I don’t accept your premise that the Japanese system is torture.

Extreme control of movement and sleep including deprivation of it for arbitrary amounts, constant lighting, no outside time, nothing to do for months at a time, lack of nutritious food, all those things in combination constitue torture under most modern definitions.